Bill Clinton stops by Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co.

As president of the United States and ex-president, Bill Clinton has now visited both locations of the Elliott Bay Book Co., its old Pioneer Square location and its more recent digs on Capitol Hill.

The 42nd president was in Seattle on Friday to do a fundraiser for the spouse he hopes to make the 45th president.

Bill Clinton was back at a familiar Seattle stop, visiting the Elliott Bay Book Co. on Friday before speaking to a Hillary Clinton fundraiser. Photo by Grant Hindsley, SeattlePI.com January 8, 2016.

As is always the case with the buttoned-up Hillary Clinton campaign, their event was closed to news coverage, and no public event was scheduled. Bill Clinton has begun doing town halls for the missus in New Hampshire, very controlled in contrast to his freewheeling presidential campaigns or appearances during Hillary’s 2008 campaign.

But the “Big Dog” of American politics enjoys both nourishing the mind and getting in at least a few minutes of public adulation.

Where else to go but the Elliott Bay Book Co.?

He diverted the motorcade to Elliott Bay-Pioneer Square after a 1999 fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee, buying books and lingering a half an hour, just enough time for the presidential motorcade to mess up rush hour traffic.

Bill Clinton was selling books when he next stopped by, using 2004 visits to Elliott Bay and Costco to autograph an estimated 3,000 copies of his autobiography “My Life” (a far better read than Hillary Clinton’s snoozer “Hard Choices”).

Bill Clinton signed T-shirts and baseball caps, in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s tightly organized, books-only stopover at University Bookstore in 2014.

The 42nd president was back Friday, this time stopping at Elliott Bay-Capitol Hill before raising bucks for Hillary at the Century Ballroom. He was just a few blocks away from the Comet Tavern, where the Bernie Sanders campaign staged a low-budget fundraiser last summer.

Bill Clinton paid 13 visits to the Northwest during his eight-year presidency. He hosted an Asia-Pacific summit at Blake Island, met with U.S. airline executives at Paine Field in Everett, staged a bus tour across Southwest Washington, and — memorably — helped push a government van out of the mud at a flood site in Cougar, Wash. He has made post-White House trips (along with Hillary) to pick up lucrative honorariums from the Vancouver Board of Trade in British Columbia and to meet with Clinton library donors at Wild Ginger.

He will likely best be remembered for giant rallies at the Pike Place Market, after which he would make the Secret Service nervous by endlessly working the rope lines.

On one visit, Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer Grant Haller took a picture of Clinton from behind, showing the president with arms outstretched. Beyond Clinton was a mass of humanity stretching up Virginia Street.

Haller was pleased with the photo, and asked a colleague to get it machine signed by the president. The White House responded with an order for 50 of the prints.

So disciplined is Clinton on the trail in 2016 that he is spending only a few minutes at rope lines in New Hampshire. But there’ll always be Elliott Bay in Seattle.

Former President Bill Clinton acknowledges well-wishers as she leaves a fundraiser for his wife, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in Seattle on Friday, Jan. 8, 2016. Grant Hindsley/seattlepi.com